Among the laws which they enacted was one limiting seats in the assembly to councillors, persons specially summoned by the proprietor's writ, and burgesses elected by the people of the different hundreds. This law controlled the make-up of the next four assemblies (October, 1640, August, 1641, March and July, 1642). Nevertheless, in September, 1642, Baltimore reverted to the old practice.
In 1649 Baltimore made another and last attempt for his initiative. He sent over a learned and complicated code of sixteen laws which he asked the assembly to adopt; but they rejected his work and sent him a code of their own, begging him in their letter not to send them any more such "bodies of laws, which served to little end than to fill our heads with jealousies and suspicions of that which we verily understand not." The next year, 1650, a constitutional system was perfected not very different from the plan adopted in the mother-country and Virginia. The assembly was divided into two chambers, the lower consisting exclusively of burgesses representing the different hundreds, and the upper of the councillors and those specially summoned by the governor.[17]
[Footnote 1: Brown, _Genesis of the United States_, II., 841.]
[Footnote 2: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, pp. 83, 93, 100.]
[Footnote 3: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, p. 104; _Md. Archives_, III., 17.]
[Footnote 5: Heath's grant, in _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1674, p. 70.]
[Footnote 6: Neill, _Founders of Maryland_, 46, 47.]
[Footnote 7: Neill, _Terra Mariæ_, 53; Ogilby, _America_, 183.]
[Footnote 9: Fiske, _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors_; Bassett, _Constitutional Beginnings of North Carolina_; Lapsley, _County Palatinate of Durham_.]
[Footnote 10: _Calvert Papers_ (Md. Hist. Soc., _Fund Publications_, No. 28), p. 132.]
[Footnote 12: White, _Relation_ (Force, _Tracts_, IV., No. xii.); letter of Leonard Calvert, _Calvert Papers_ (Md. Hist. Soc., _Fund Publications_, No. 35), pp. 32-35; Baltimore, _Relation_ (London, 1635).]
[Footnote 13: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 166.]
[Footnote 14: Neill, _Founders of Maryland_, 80.]
[Footnote 15: Johnson, _Old Maryland Manors (Johns Hopkins University Studies_, I., No. iii.).]